1. Technical Field
The invention is a method and apparatus useful in optical character recognition for producing skeletonized character images from character bitmaps using a thinning process which is based on the emergent behavior of populations of competitive locally independent processes (CLIP's).
2. Background Art
Optical character recognition processes often require that an image or bitmap of an unknown character be thinned or skeletonized before the optical character recognition process can begin its attempt to recognize the character. Numerous techniques are known for performing optical character recognition in connection with a character thinning process. Such prior art character thinning techniques suffer from a number of significant disadvantages. First, such techniques are susceptible to noise along the boundaries of an unknown character. For example, the images of some unknown characters have burrs or spurs in them. Such burrs or spurs in the unknown character often produce what appears to be an actual character stroke in the corresponding thinned or skeleton character image, thus in many cases leading to an incorrect identification of the unknown character. Often, such techniques are computationally expensive and not necessarily adapted to parallel processing.
What is needed is a character thinning process which is nearly impervious to boundary noise (such as burrs or spurs) in an unknown character image, is computationally efficient and is easily implemented in a highly parallel architecture.